New Year, New plans

Everyone’s busy making New Year resolutions but I prefer not to embarrass myself when the year ends by taking stock and revealing that no resolution was kept beyond a day or two!

One thing I know is that I must make time to send stories out. I so enjoy writing the things that I tend not to do the necessary submissions. But perhaps it is just as well. I have a contemporary ghost story set in France which, through no fault of its own, fell foul of its first publisher (they went bankrupt) and recently found a second home with Sapphire Blue. Now, I had already added another twenty thousand words to the story before they saw it and I thought it was – well, done. As in complete. Finito.

But two rounds with an editor have shown me that is not so. I’ve added motivation, internal physical reactions, external physical reactions and removed almost every use of the pronoun ‘it.’ I’ve discovered that words like ‘rucked’ seem unknown in the US. It was an interesting exercise and a learning curve but eventually, once more I thought I was done. But no: my story has now gone on to the copy editors. I’ve never had a copy editor before, and I wait to see what they will require of me.

It was just as well that I had no second or third story out, for Sod’s law would have brought them home with demands for attention at the same time. Phew! Narrow escape.